Many small businesses and individual merchants either have limited data relating to their business practices, customers, supply chains, and other aspects of their day-to-day operations or possess such data, but do not have a reliable mechanism by which to access that data and implement it to develop useful advice. Transaction data entries and payment transactions that have been cleared and forwarded to payment processors may include valuable information relevant to the optimization of operations at the small business. In addition, other sources of information exist that can help clarify a cause and effect relationship between external conditions and changes in the performance of the small business. Such information may not be readily available to a merchant and/or may not exist in a format in which the merchant can acquire such information.
Merchant-users of payment networks typically have some information stored in a merchant server that may include payments and purchases that have not yet been forwarded to payment processors, or other types of information including customer payment preferences and customer delivery or pickup preferences. Examples of data that may be extracted from such information include market share data. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/498,194 entitled “Method and System for Identifying Merchant Market Shares Based on Purchase Data” filed on Sep. 26, 2014 describes one way to obtain market share data from the information available from businesses and is incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Although this corpus of information is being generated by a typical small business, the resources are not ordinarily available for the small business to analyze this information to derive useful information the small business can use to improve their performance. Even if the small business has the resources to analyze this information and derive useful information, the techniques used to derive the useful information are specific to interpreting large volumes of various types of information and may not be within the skills of a typical small business owner. Further, additional information, not readily available to a merchant, may be useful and necessary to providing a comprehensive analysis of the merchant's business practices and determining strategic pathways forward. For instance, data related to merchants other than that merchant, may be necessary to provide a robust analysis of the merchant's business. Such information may be confidential and may not be accessible in a way that protects personally identifiable information.
Small businesses and merchants may not have the time, resources (computational or otherwise), or skillset to analyze the type of data necessary to provide a comprehensive strategic review of their own business practices. Further, even if a merchant had access to data for assessing business development needs, businesses and merchants may spend a vast amount of time developing search terms which may not return the analysis or type of data which is actually being sought. Additionally, such software may not take into account the type of data which similar users are seeking. Further, as a business grows or otherwise develops, the analytical needs of a merchant user may change.
Accordingly, a need exists to provide a technical solution which enables a small business owner or merchant to submit natural language queries and receive comprehensive and relevant analytics. Further, a need exists for a technical solution which takes into account a multitude of information not directly related to a merchant user, develops a comprehensive report, and automatically provides such a report without burdening the user. A need exists which enables a system to provide accurate and customized analytics to merchant or small business owner requests, even where the merchant user fails to accurately identify search terms keyed to the data being sought.
There exists a need to address this technical problem by providing sales information and other insights through a conversational interface so that the small business owner can easily analyze the wealth of available information and derive useful information that can be used to improve the performance of the small business. The conversational interface is of particular use because the small business owner need not know specific terms of art needed to derive useful information and can instead simply submit natural language queries to determine how to improve the performance of their small business. The technical problem is therefore addressed by providing an easy to use interface that allows for actionable information to be extracted from the information generated by a typical business. Additionally, the technical problem is addressed by providing natural language query suggestions and automatic reports to users based upon crowd-sourced data (e.g., of similar merchant users), payment network data, and/or usage data, etc. which may be otherwise unaccessible to a user.